Do you see your company name in thoses results ? No ? You see always the same page when you click a link ? This is the purpose of those spammers!

If your company have a french section and you working in; design, hosting, optimization or indexation... You have a good chance to be there, not necessarily in the snip of the search engine result page, but in the hidden code of thoses pages, reveal here by the cached version cached page.

They grab all the information of thoses legitimate sites and code it a way to have a good ranking in search engine using a huge number of links and H1 tags with your content and trademark name!

Feed readers have at their disposal near infinite processing power, well-differentiated and -defined data and… do nothing with them. You can sort your feed items by date. Exciting!

Totally agree! My RSS aggregator features only sort on date, headline and topic!?!

Where are the extrapolations, based on the data? Where is Bayesian filtering? Why isn’t there auto-correlation between like items? Why isn’t there sorting by link popularity? Or inter-linking between feeds? Why can’t I rank feeds or categories higher than others? Why can’t I rate items and let the cumulative ratings over time determine feed rankings? Why isn’t there some statistical combination of each of the above to put what I’m actually going to care about at the top of the list and the discussions about which syndication protocol is best at the bottom?

When you read this, the majority of aggregators seem more like FTP programs. RSS and XML are the future of search and the only innovations we see are Web based like the Technorati or other Blogline, Pubsub and MyRSS!

Monday, August 30, 2004

According to this estimate, the Google server farm constitutes the most powerful supercomputer in the world, being able to perform at least three times as many calculations per second as the Earth Simulator.

Sunday, August 29, 2004

Since the month the Google index size has not change! First time, since the launch of Google, the index size is not updating within a year ? Is the 4,294,967,296 pages (2^32) give a problem to engineer ?

"In short, usability is the ease with which someone can use your website to do a particular task and get the expected results based on what they currently know,"

"In other words, the site has to be intuitive. Still, many companies are not addressing the usability problem at the level they should to avoid website usability pitfalls."

This one may be ring a bell to website managers ?

"When a site is designed with usability in mind, there is a large drop-off in the need for user training, expensive help desks to answer questions from confused web users, and it drastically reduces the need for future rewrites," Elges says. "In addition, usability noticeably increases the lifespan of your website, since most rewrites are due to poor usability issues."

Wednesday, August 25, 2004

Content (BBS) : games exchange, messagerie rose (adult-oriented chat originated from Minitel) and forum exchange of all kind used by the wired geeks ("early adopter" what not yet the buzz word ;-) who where using BBS

Content : Research and studies, games, some university presence, personal diary, some big corporation and again messagerie rose
Marketing techniques : Words of mouth, campus babillard, computer magazines ads and articles, some media meme and the appering of Excite, Yahoo and WebCrawler

Homo neandertalensis (1995-99)modemus: 19,200-56,000 baudus

Content : Emerging content from all you can imagine. From casino and porn to guy who put a site on his wall-mart coupon to computer free to navigate the web, with all the stuff we get now. "Free-for-all" period.

Not a so stupid prediction. First this! Second the Gmail Notifier and Google Deskbar have prove the people at Google can make software with a good integration with Windows OS. Third the Gmail application who use a extensive javascipt library without bugs. Third, the recent acquisiton of; Blogger, Picasa and Hello Instant Messenger picture sharing tool.
Like Jason Kottke also note in his story about it :

A Google Browser would give the Mozilla platform instant credibility and would be a big hit. The peerless Google brand & reputation and their huge reach are the keys here. Mom and Dad know about Google...if Google offered a browser that was as powerful and easy to use as their search engine and didn't scum up their system, they'd download it.

This is a very huge new market (more than 1 million blogspot users multiply by the number of pages of each blog = $$$)! Ok let me be conservative. If only 5% is eligible with each one at 10 pages for ads, it still give you half a million pages for ads placement.

CNN have a paper on The next Google! It is about Eurekster and Dipsie who hope to become the next big thing.

Eurekster is up and running and going better from test to test I performed with the exceptions of is MSN search URL in the results and some feature I don't like (most popular, recent searches).

But Dipsie is a really weird choice to put it in the next big thing ! Here some of a march 2004 interview with Jason Wiener:

You won't be able to search for yourself until May 10, when Dipsie's search engine (www.dipsie.com) will open to the public with 5 billion documents in its index -- about 16.5 percent more than Google's index. (An index is the place where documents are stored so users can retrieve them when they search.)

Oups... Whe are at the end of august now!
Yahoo grab the web and a 2-3 billion documents in a few weeks only after leaving the Google results!

The result is what Wiener describes as Dipsie's "robotic" technology that Wiener said enables Dipsie to locate 99 percent of the documents on the Web -- content that Google and rival search engine Yahoo ignore, Wiener said.

How come nobody have ever see their Dipsie-bot in their log files ? I ask this question in a few forums, I look over a dozen clients log files and we never saw is trace! Also I never see anyone who get any reply of the Dipsie SEO Beta Signup !

I was looking if the republicans and democrats have already start their PPC campaign in the two major search engine. I try different keywords like; election, november 2004, war, iraq, economy, jobs, stronger america. Nothing!
But if you search for wmd in Yahoo! you finally got a ad for the John Kerry who lead you to... A page not found error !!!
Ouffff... Nice ROI!
BTW : Failure give Georges W. Bio in first result on Google and second spot on Yahoo!.

Saturday, August 21, 2004

A Web page misconfiguration left dozens of the liberal political group's subscriber pages easily searchable through simple Google queries. Each page included a subscriber's name, e-mail address and the mailing lists to which he or she is subscribed. CNET News.com confirmed that several related searches turned up more than two dozen individual subscriber pages

The information leak is the latest version of "Google hacking," using the search engine's advanced features to find data leaked by Web sites.

The big problem with this story, it is only reffering to Google and it's two dozen results.
I got to Yahoo!, and in a minute, I found more than 300 hundreds of thoses pages with email, name, subscribed lists and sometimes much more:

As this capture screen show, you can get more information than only name and email address in Yahoo pages:

It's not only Yahoo and Google, it's any good search engine with a way to see a store copy of the page. Even Gigablast, with is relatively small database have some results !
Inspired by Gary Price of ResourceShelf

.. Analysts expect China to boast the largest Web population within five years..

Thoses analysts should check the position; 3, 5, 6, 7 and 8 of Alexa Global Top 500 List! Half of the "Global Top Ten sites" is now chinese. Even Google lost in third position to Sina, the major portal of China.

American sites have 40% of thoses top ten, living one to the Japan. The analysts should lower their metric and prediction to 2-3 years maximum!

Friday, August 20, 2004

Yes this is true, specially if I count the recent number of phones and emails I received for optimization and formation. This quote will reflect the new tendency :

More importantly, said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch, many users - as many as 70% - don't look at paid listings at all, while new software is capable of stripping out paid search ads.

For my part, I saw less than 10 ads since a few weeks! The Block image function in Mozilla/Firefox plus the Adblock are so easy to use, the manager of the big portal will have to incorporate ads from the same server who deserve the picture of the site if they want to sell ads in a near future!!!

Wednesday, August 18, 2004

Whoupi doo! If you read it, you will see why I laugh a bit at this first post. A bit too much of self-congratulation. Bad PR from marketers who don't understand really what is a corporate blog ! It's not to proclame we are the best, the finest, blablabla, it's more in my mind to annonce new stuff coming up, get idea and interact with your customers.

Also note in the right column the "Industry Source"*. This is not a very good idea ! It will make jealous and it's not the purpose of a SE !!!

Since a few day Blogger have replace the ad at the top of the Blogspot-hosted blog users with a NavBar. The search feature is using Google and is the same as a query like this one:

site:name-of-the-blog.blogspot.com keywords

This is a bit tricky, if the blogger published a lot of stories, because the recent posts is not always already in the Google index and the look and feal of the search box is give you the idea it perform the search inside you pages.

But I was surprised to see in my log a few visits from other Blogger (italian, singapore, american and canadian) users who seem to use the Next Blog Button to start hitting random blogs.
Note: you can change your Blogger NavBar color in the Template Tab.

Tuesday, August 17, 2004

In his own five-step bidding strategy, Pincus explained, his faith in Google as a wise investment decreases with every US$10 increment. And so, on Saturday morning, Pincus placed five separate bids on Google: US$1.5 million at US$50; US$1 million at US$60; US$500,000 at $70; $400,000 at $80; and "for the fun of it," a US$100,000 allotment at US$90 a share.

As for Abraham, several weeks ago he had planned to bid on 5,000 shares. But as the market for technology stocks plummeted and Google committed a series of public stumbles, he trimmed his appetite to 1,000 shares by the time the auction opened on Friday morning.

On Friday, Abraham placed bids for 200 shares at five different prices: US$110, US$102, US$95, US$88 and US$75.

If the final price is set at US$90, Abraham's first three bids would be accepted. He would end up with 600 shares, at a cost of US$54,000.

Note: The initial price of the aunction have been set between $108 to $135 range.

Who in 1999 will thought the two promising main search engines will beat veteran players like MSNBC and almost surpassing CNN in the news industry? Google with is 6.3 million reach is quite surprising for a news service compiled solely by computer algorithms without human intervention.

Google News: A reversed RSS system.

They grab the news feeds from differents sources and build a news site with it!!!

The MSN beta preview Search Engine is now over. I give him a few tests, and laugh a bit, and my impression was the actual MSN search site have better results. The worstest thing about that beta was the no-duplicate domain filter. For a query you can have to 7 results pointing to the same domain ;-(

Note that Microsoft give you a link on Sandbox now, where you still have a link on the beta preview ;-)

Company will have to count on last-minute rushFrom CBS MarketWatch by Bambi :

From the It's not even that investors aren't bidding the proposed price of between $108 and $135, but that Google isn't getting enough bids at all, according to the banker, who asked not to be identified.

Monday, August 16, 2004

A new kind of meta search engine who give you the overlapping results on 2 of the 3 search engines they use: Google, Yahoo and AskJeeves. You will see the overlapping results are a lot less than you thought before!

Here is a research (pdf) made by Pew Internet & American Life Project (PIP) and comScore Networks on the top 25 search engines with 1,399 Internet users between May 14 and June 17 :

• Americans conducted 3.9 billion total searches in June
• 44% of those searches were done from home computers, 49% were done from work computers, and 7% were done at university-based computers.
• The average Internet user performed 33 searches in June.
• The average visit to a search engine resulted in 4.4 searches.
• The average visitor scrolled through 1.8 result pages during a typical search.

That last quote surprising me a bit. The last digit I have give less than 1.8 page. But it's possible because the change of algo in Google where you got more different kinds of results in the first page. Here is other facts by that study :

• In June, the average user spent 41 minutes at search engine sites.
• comScore estimates that 40-45 percent of searches include sponsored results.
• Approximately 7 percent of searches in March included a local modifier, such as city and state names, phone numbers or the words “map” or “directions.”
• The percentage of searches that occurred through browser toolbars in June was 7%.

It's working hard at Microsoft to improve relevancy of their MSN search engine. After the Vision-based Page Segmentation Algorithm who seem to be a brilliant new approach to understand the topic of a page and value them, here is the Block-level Link Analysis who seem to be a evolution of the precedent one. Whatch out other boys.

Thursday, August 12, 2004

Yes !!! Finally one crook is out. Why I suspect they are abusing theirs clients :

1- It is impossible to offer guarantees, except if the client have a very specific niche. And even there, you can not control the change of algo in the SE (Many of the White Hat SEO have been hit hard by the november 2003 update at Google).

You can normally rank in the top ten, but in some sector like traveling, hotel, casino, banking, hosting, real estate, pills, etc, it is almost impossible without making a huge makeover and add a lot of content's pages and some reviews and historical data.

It's like other SEO company slogan I too often saw:

We will promote your site on 20 or 50 keywords !!!

Optimizing a site is not only push 20 or 50 keywords/phrases ! It is educating the ; owners, copywriters, programmers, sysadmin, designers and integrators to focus on "search engine mind" and clients when they do something on the site!!!

Text descriptions and links to our client's optimized page will be placed on all six of our shopping malls at 4GreatBuys.com

2- All thoses pages, where are the links, have PageRank 0 to 3. It would even be list with the link: fonction of Google!

3- You NEVER have to resubmit a site, except if it disappearing from the search engine.
4- The 8,500 minor search engines is a scam. This is done with a program and you never know if the site will be there and if you put your email address you'll be spam with a huge numbers of email. And even that, the major six engines drive more than 95% of your traffic.

Guarantees top-20 ranking on at least 4 major search engines

5- With one top-20 ranking on Google you will also automatically have the top-20 in AOL, Netscape and IWon. The same is true with Yahoo where you're always, (almost), got the same positions appearing in MSN, Altavista and AlltheWeb.

Funny fact, in june I post on a blog a new government site who was online for the first time that day. The day after it was in Google! About five weeks earlier I post another thread, on a forum, a brand new site and it was indexed 3 days after.

It is a very good metasearch and surprisingly fast engine, with a good products tab, but the image; news and find a friend, leave me on my appetite. The history is a nice feature, for all the tabs, but the email search is not working since sunday ;-(.

If that engine add a clustering feature like Vivisimo and can give you the choice of the search site it is crawling (MSN & Lycos is redundant), it will be a nice alternative to others meta engines.

Monday, August 09, 2004

From the ACLU(American Civil Liberties Union) and via Wired Magazine, this report (Pdf 1.5 MB) open a trend of how Bush can bypass legal restrictions on domestic spying! Here some little snips :

Florida’s TIPS.

In a direct local imitation of the original TIPS concept, police in Orange County, Florida are planning to train emergency personnel, cable workers and other public and private workers to look for and report evidence of terrorism, drug trafficking, or child pornography in private homes. Overseen by Florida state police officials, the program’s brochure originally included an element of explicit racial profiling. Though that was removed, the program is still underway, leaving homeowners to wonder if anything in their home might draw suspicion whenever a cable or utility worker comes in to do a repair.

Colleges and universities.

A 2001 survey found that 195 colleges and universities had turned over private information on students to the FBI, often in apparent violation of privacy laws; 172 of them did not even wait for a subpoena.

Internet

Internet service providers report that search orders have “gone through the roof.” ISPs maintain records of individuals’ Internet use, including records of IP addresses (a number that is assigned to each computer that connects to the Internet) that can be combined with logs automatically maintained by most Web servers to identify which individuals have visited a Web site, participated in “anonymous” chat or message boards or adopted a particular online pseudonym. In 2002 alone, for example, BellSouth received about 16,000 subpoenas from law enforcement and 636 court orders for customer information.

A system for government “Google searches” through Americans’ private financial records

The Patriot Act mandates that companies transform themselves into surrogate agents for the government.

Background checks: from reporting to enforcement

It turns companies into sheriff’s deputies,responsible not just for feeding information to the government, but for actually enforcing the government’s wishes, for example by effectively blacklisting anyone who has been labeled as a suspect under the government’s less-than-rigorous procedures for identifying risks.

After been profitable since the last 12 quarters (july 2001), Google will be in the red zone for this quarter ending in september after they settled the dispute over Yahoo!/Overture bidding ad technology. And this is after the last week story of the 23 million shares not included in the propectus. Really hard summer for Sergey, Larry and Eric !

Saturday, August 07, 2004

I was keeping my old Internet Explorer just because of a toolbar who help a lot to pre-program my search and who only work for IE. But that's over now for the Bill's browser.

Tired to go to your favorite search engine and type long sequence of characters in search box like this one ?Here a query to find all the page at Google on the site www.constellationw3.com

Here is what I do now for exactly the same result :(and for any othe domain name ending by .com)

How I do that on the Address Bar of Firefox (or Mozilla) ?

1- Go to your favorite engine and type your normal query.2- Take the beginning of the resulting URL (where is the logo) and drop-it in a folder you have made in your personnal toolbar.Note: The bookmark itself will not be useful. It's his association with a keyword who are important. And to remember easily all your keywords, my personnal trick is to put it in a folder in your personnal toolbar.

3- Go to that folder where is now the bookmark and right click on it and choose PropertiesGo to the location box and change the domain name (or the word on your query) by "%s" (whitout the quote)Before : http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.constellationw3.com+-sdfgagwAfter : http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.%s.com+-sdfgagw

4- Enter the keyword you want in "Keyword Box:" gs5- Also it is a good idea to put also the keyword you just enter in the "Name Box:" to remember it: (gs)

Result : Now for each site, ending by .com, I want to know how many pages Google have in is index a just type :"gs name-of-the-site" without any other characters (site:, www, .com) in my address bar of Firefox !!!

6- Repeat step 1 to 5, for each site you visit often (who got a search box) and type the queries you make on them directly in the address bar on Firefox or Mozilla.

Note: You can't pass more than one parameter. .I try using it for a "link:%s(domain name) -site:%s(domain name)" and the second parameter remain "%s" in the query string.

Here is my favorite searches folder who help me to remember all my keywords :Enjoy you new fast searches with Firefox

Friday, August 06, 2004

Google have make their annual party "Google Dance 2004" in the same time was nearby the Search Engine Strategies at San Jose.

For those who read about the Google Dance 2004 you would have noticed they ran out of beer early within the party. That's why when you make a query for "ses party rule #1" on Yahoo! now you will see a funny thing at the beginning of the page!

MRQE is a must to see how a movie can be appreciate over all the world. On international film you have reviews and critics in many languages (english, french, italian, portuguese, castellano and more) from movie magazines, newspapers and others sources. Sometimes you also got a quotation of the film and some link to Dvd sellers.

Thursday, August 05, 2004

With a free access of unlimited blogs it was sure some nasty peoples will use-it to promote illicit for-profit porn sites. Here the story by Wired.

All the links to thoses examples blogs, in the story, are now out but if you made a search in Google like this one you should see one in first position. They created around 80 blogs heavily cross-linked and they are there since january. That a real exemple of black-hat SEO!

Update: Worst then I was thinking !!! More than 400 sites fully indexed in Blogspot alone and 3,680 other pages waiting to be fully indexed !

I try Yahoo! Local and I don't understand why the integration of SmartView is not the same ? When you use the link of SmartView in Yahoo Local result (here for search of "Hotel in New York" you dont have the possibility to see a larger map like this same search in SmartView and you have less informations in the pop-up box like; Price of the room,number of rooms/floors, etc !

Monday, August 02, 2004

Topix, launch in march, have already made a makeover and add some new features in it. Now with more than 7000 sources, this news aggregator was my favorite news site since he be online. The 150,000 topic's page have now a email alert and RSS feed. Some on the news also get a small popularity ranking box.

But the main new feature, who should be adopt by other site, is the dynamic sub-menu. When you drill down in categories, the submenu of that category will reflect you visits. They also be reorder with your latest categories you have visited. Very smart feature!